Solitaire, Part 2 of 3 by Alice Oseman Read Free Book Online Page A

looked like that.
    Yesterday, Michael Holden told me a lot of things, and one of those things was where he lives. Therefore – and I’m still not quite sure how or why this happens – something on this desolate Sunday makes me get up off the sofa and journey to his house on the Dying Sun.
    The Dying Sun is a clifftop overlooking the river. It’s the only cliff in the county. I don’t know why there’s a cliff over a river because there are never normally cliffs over rivers except in films and abstract documentaries about places you will never go to. But the Dying Sun is so dramatically named because, if you stand facing out on the furthest point of the cliff, you are exactly opposite the sun as it sets. A couple of years back, I decided to take a walk around our town and I remember the long brown house that sat mere metres away from the cliff edge, like it was ready to take a leap.
    Maybe it’s the fact that I can actually remember all this that causes me to wander up the long country lane and halt outside the brown house on the Dying Sun at nine o’clock in the morning.
    Michael’s house has a wooden gate and a wooden door and a sign on its front wall reading ‘Jane’s Cottage’. It’s somewhere you’d expect either a farmer or a lonely old person to live. I stand there, just outside the gate. Coming here was a mistake. An utter mistake. It’s like nine in the morning. No one is up at nine in the morning on a Sunday. I can’t just knock at someone’s house. That’s what you did in primary school, for God’s sake.
    I head back down the lane.
    I’ve taken twenty steps when I hear the sound of his front door opening.
    “
Tori?
”
    I stop in the road. I shouldn’t have come here. I should not have come here.
    “Tori? That is you, isn’t it?”
    Very slowly, I turn round. Michael has shut the gate and is jogging down the road towards me. He stops before me and grins his dazzling grin.
    For a moment, I don’t actually believe it’s him. He is positively dishevelled. His hair, usually gelled into a side parting, flies around in wavy tufts, and he’s wearing a truly admirable amount of clothes, including a woolly jumper and woolly socks. His glasses are slipping off his nose. He doesn’t look awake and his voice, normally so wispy, is a little hoarse.
    “Tori!” he says and clears his throat. “It’s Tori Spring!”
    Why did I come here? What was I thinking? Why am I an idiot?
    “You came to my house,” he says, shaking his head back and forth in what can only be described as pure amazement. “I mean, I thought you might, but I didn’t at the same time … you know?”
    I glance to one side. “Sorry.”
    “No, no, I’m really glad that you did. Really.”
    “I can go home. I didn’t mean to—”
    “
No
.”
    He laughs and it’s a nice laugh. He runs a hand through his hair. I’ve never seen him do that before.
    I find myself smiling back. I’m not quite sure how that happens either.
    A car rolls up behind us and we quickly move to the side of the road to let it pass. The sky is still a little orange and, in every other direction except the town, all you can see are fields, many abandoned and wild, their long grass flowing like sea waves. I start to feel like I’m actually in the
Pride and Prejudice
film, you know, that bit at the end where they go out to that field in the mist and the sun is rising.
    “Would you like to … go out?” I say. Then quickly add: “Today?”
    He is literally awestruck. Why. Am I. An idiot.
    “Y-yes. Definitely. Wow, yes.
Yes
.”
    Why.
    I look back to the house.
    “You have a nice house,” I say. I wonder what it’s like inside. I wonder who his parents are. I wonder how he’s decorated his bedroom. Posters? Lights? Maybe he painted something. Maybe he has old board games stacked up on shelves. Maybe he has a beanbag. Maybe he has figurines. Maybe he has Aztec-patterned bed sheets and black walls, and teddies in a box, and a diary under his